New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century eBook

reveals it as virtually a Hindu revival society.
Finally, we read, the old philosopher Pythagoras, Apollonius
of Tyana, and others were represented on the stage
dressed in imitation of Christ Himself, and the Emperor
Alexander Severus [A.D. 222-235] placed the figure
of Christ in his lararium alongside of those of Abraham,
Orpheus, and Apollonius. There we have the modern
Indians who fully recognise Christ alongside of their
own avatars. The whole parallel is complete.[105]
In spite of the feebleness and, it may be, unworthiness
of His Church, through the force of Christ’s
personality, the Roman history of the second, third,
and fourth centuries has been repeating itself in
India in the nineteenth and twentieth, and unless the
force of Christ’s personality be spent, the
parallels will proceed.

From new reasonings about God, her new monotheism,
New India has been brought a stage farther to actual
history. From theologies she has come to the
first three Gospels. New India has been introduced
to Christ as He actually lived on earth before men’s
eyes; and to India, intensely interested in religious
teachers, the personality of the Christ of the Gospels,
of the first three Gospels in particular, appeals strongly.
To the pessimistic mood of India He appeals as one
whose companionship makes this life more worth living;
for Christ was not a jogi in the Indian sense of a
renouncer of the world. His call to fraternal
service has taken firm hold of the best Indians of
to-day. Of the future we know not, but we feel
that the narrative of the first three Gospels naturally
precedes the deeper insight of the fourth.

CHAPTER XVII

INDIAN PESSIMISM—­ITS BEARING ON BELIEF IN THE HERE AND HEREAFTER

“How many births are past, I cannot
tell:
How many yet to come, no man can say:
But this alone I know, and know full well,
That pain and grief embitter all the way.”

“When desire is gone,
and the cords of the heart are broken,
then the soul is delivered
from the world and is at rest in
God.”

[Sidenote: Indian pessimism.]

Two commonplaces about India are that pessimism is
her natural temperament, and that a natural outcome
of her pessimism is the Indian doctrine of the transmigration
of souls. The second statement will require explanation;
but as regards the former, there is no denying the
strain of melancholy, the note of hopelessness, that
pervades these words we have quoted, or that they
are characteristic of India. In them life seems
a burden; to be born into it, a punishment; and of
the transmigrations of our souls from life to life,
seemingly, we should gladly see the end. All
the same, as new India is proving, pessimism is not
the inherent temperament of India, and the hope of
the end of the transmigration, and of the lives of
the soul, no more natural in India than in any other
land.